You can even remove that dependency if you modify your makespec (search the qtcentre.org forums).
Citation needed.
I've searched high and low for a direct answer on this, and I can't find one. I've read lots and lots of comments that hint that it can be done, but I don't see where I can download a static version of the library to link against, or instructions on how to download the sources and compile my own. If anyone can actually point to a link, I'd be thankful.
Oh, I know where the problem lies. It's in the nVidia disk drivers for my "RAID" controller. Nice, huh? Once they're installed, you basically can't go back. I tried, and reinstalled for the effort. However, I actually lost some data running on the older drivers, so I went back to using the latest version. I keep waiting on a newer version of the nForce drivers to come out. I'd blame it on hardware, but Linux has never had a problem with it. I saw a pie chart the other day that showed that nVidia drivers are responsible for about 30% of all BSOD's.
Just compile statically, and you won't have to bundle anything. OK, you'll probably need to include the mingw10.dll. And libmysql.dll if your app accesses a MySQL database, like mine does.
I've read some things that make me think that you can build the mingw library into your app, but I've also read things that make me run away from that idea screaming.
Also, it's probably possible to build MySQL statically, and then wrap it into the executable as well, but it's not something I want to try.
(Cue people giving the argument, "but Microsoft will just change Windows". Yes, they might, but that doesn't affect the installed base of applications, nor does it affect the myriad third party applications, and if there was a viable target, third party companies would ensure compatability.)
Balogna. They already did this. Back in the days of Office 2000, Codeweavers released Crossover Office, and it was BRILLIANT. RadHat 7.2 with Ximian Desktop and Crossover was the height of Linux desktop usability to me. Something I'm only getting back to in the past couple of years with Gentoo.
(RedHat went to Fedora, and SuSE had it's share of problems. And then, admittedly, I moved to a laptop at work, and even I didn't try to run Linux on it for about 3 years.)
Microsoft saw the writing on the wall. Office XP broke Crossover. Badly. It took them YEARS to figure out how to make it work again, and it still wasn't up to the level of Office 2000. I don't know where it's at now, but I was getting the distinct impression that Microsoft was continuing to play a pretty serious cat-and-mouse game with Wine in general, and Crossover in particular.
I got the free copy they released recently. I should really give it a go again, but I'm now at a place that runs all of their internal systems on Linux, people hardly ever worry about Office documents, and I finally don't have to deal with an Exchange server!
I wouldn't mind if they bundled everything they make, and everything they don't make as well! Just put a price tag on it and let the market sort it out. What I can't stand is that they essentially GIVE the software away through bundling deals with the OEM's, but tell them that they can't install any other software that competes with their products, essentially causing the OEM's to eat the difference, and pass the savings on to their customers. THAT'S anti-capitalistic. Unfortunately, government's only answer is to do what they've done, which includes forcing Microsoft to GIVE MORE of their software away to schools, further entrenching their monopoly. Gah!
Microsoft's making all their money from corporate sales, who are basically beholden because of the Office monopoly. All I want is for Microsoft to sell the same piece of software for the same price to everyone. Let them have 42 editions, for all I care, but just box it and price it and let the market sort it out.
How many individuals do you know have paid full retail price for either Windows or Office? If I could go buy either one for what they cost the OEM, the tier-1 Select customer, or the college student -- or if THEY had to pay what -I- pay, then I would consider that competition. I'd even consider it fair to meet in the middle. If Vista Ultimate cost what a new copy of OS X cost, that would seem to be about right. Have you seen what it actually retails for? Scary.
That's because a typical BSD distro usually has a lot less software installed (out of the box) than a typical Linux distro. They especially have fewer services running.;-)
Ah... someone else who couldn't understand Linux. Please, sir, there's no need to bitter about it. *nix-based operating systems ARE user friendly, they're just picky about who their friends are.
There are a lot of comments here that are claiming that these comparisons are bad. Bad for who? Maybe bad for YOU, in particular, but I thought some of it was interesting.
Actually, the disk space question is important to me. I have some older WD Raptors in a stripe, and I only have 136 GB of usable space. I tried installing Vista 64-bit over my 12 GB XP partition, and got a low-disk-space warning right after I logged in.
I immediately started doing things like moving the swap file to my data volume, and turning off hibernation and offline-files support, but every time I cleared up some space, Windows would turn around and eat it again. I still have no idea what it was gobbling it up for.
As an aside, it turns out that BOTH the 32-bit AND 64-bit versions of Vista were incredibly crashy for me. I only keep Windows around to play games, and Fallout 3 crashed 3 times within 5 minutes on 64-bit, and 5 times within an hour on 32-bit. I'm back on XP where I get a couple BSOD's every month, but it's only when I go to shutdown. I can play as long as I'd like.
I'm all for Windows and Office and all the rest...
Having used Windows for years, it does not have NEAR the functionality of any given Linux distro without heavy tweaking.
I mean, come on, I have to install office programs, compilers, editors, (non-DRM) media players, (real) CD/DVD burning programs, terminals, secure communication programs, (real) file transfer programs, etc., and that's just the top categories. Let alone all the crap you have to install, just because you're using Windows, like anti-virus and anti-malware programs.
And then there's the lovely day that a program simply... stops working. Why? Who knows! Time to format and reinstall!
Seriously. I have a Windows partition because I like PC video gaming. (Lord, help me, sometimes even I don't know why. I keep all my drivers up to date, but I still get BSOD's a couple times a month.) But I can't stand to try to use it for real work.
PLEASE mod parent DOWN. How this guy managed to bypass the usual notation of posting domains behind links, I don't know, but, thankfully, he's not clever enough to bypass the preview of the link in the status bar of FireFox...
Except the way all the Linux updaters seem to work, is that they'll never update major versions in any supported way. So if your distro came with OpenOffice 3.0, it might update you all the way to 3.0.42, but it'll be a cold day in hell before you get 3.1. You need to upgrade to the next version of the distro for that.
I had -one- situation like this when I was a teen driver. Very late in a little town, and the cop just told me to go home. At 16 and on the honor roll, being thrown in jail could have really put a dent in my life. I'm very thankful for how that turned out.
However, now that I'm just about 40, the more I hear about stories like this, the more upset I get about the situation in general. The police simply should NOT have this sort of discretion. I think that, if people were held strictly accountable to the law, we might stand a better chance at getting some of the more stupid, invasive, and egregious laws fixed.
Take your tail light example, for instance. Should there really be laws that make driving with a tail light out a crime? Maybe, maybe not. What it is used for is to pull people over to provide an opportunity to bust them for a more serious crime. (Now that I think about it, I currently have a tail light out.) If EVERYone who has a light out got pulled over and given a ticket tomorrow, the outcry might get that law repealed. I don't think it's a policeman's job to adjudicate who gets punished and who doesn't.
Add to this the fact that, as I've lived, I've known various people in law enforcement. Now, none of us are perfect; I understand that. But, when I was younger, I just expected that folks in law enforcement would live on a little higher plane of morality than the rest of us. The fact is, they're just people too. And, given that, it makes giving them this incredible, far-reaching authority even more difficult to swallow.
This is a really good point. The cost got passed on to me (or, rather, my employer) through their fees and tuition.
When the local university around here first signed up, I read the license from top to bottom in order to know how this was going to affect people. At least at the time, it said that -- once you matriculated -- the software was yours, and you could do anything with it that you wanted to (except resell it, of course). I wonder if that license has been changed. I didn't read it when I bought my copies. Any more, I don't care. With Microsoft putting all the activation stuff in there, I figure, if they want to really enforce their copyright, they can add on parts that would make it "die" in 4 years, or whatever. It's their problem, not mine. I WANT them to do this, but they never will, because it would drive another section of the buying public to, say, Ubuntu. (Gentoo FTW!)
And as for the poster who thought my copy of Office 2K wasn't legit, sorry but my boss picked them up along with some desktops when a local business folded. We ended up with a truckload of desktops, some office furniture, and all the nice Premium software packed up into boxes from the auction.
Another good example. Last time I checked (and that was quite awhile ago, I admit), Microsoft didn't allow you to resell the license. In fact, and this is from having dealt with the licensing for the CAD/CAM/FEA department for many years, I can't think of anyone who does. In our IT department, we would roll out deprecated machines to a local charity who would refurbish them for needy school kids. Since we were getting (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) our licenses on the new computers, the license of the existing (and age-appropriate) MS OS would still be valid, right? Nope. Not even for that sort of charitable work. So, unless that policy got reversed, again, that would be a -- technically -- illegal way to get Microsoft software. Again, this is a way that Microsoft gets to own the proprietary software world, yet never has to face the music on their own anti-competitive retail pricing.
While I'm at it, the big rumor at the time I was learning about all of that was that you could use the same license on a laptop if you had a desktop machine for the majority of your use. That, and using the secondary license like that, only on a home computer. Nope! The MS rep squashed that in a big hurry.
And while folks here like to point out the high cost of MS Office I simply doubt that most users are paying retail. I picked up my MS Office 2K Pro for around $50 years ago and I got MS Office 2K3 for free from school.
I don't think you're copy of O2K Pro was legitimate. I had this discussion with a Microsoft employee just before my Fortune 250 company bought a Select license agreement. She was adamant that there was NO WAY that I bought a legit copy of Office 95 for less than the retail price of (something like) $500. My copy was probably stolen, or maybe it was just a really good pirated version. I think Microsoft's newer registration and activation system has done a good job of closing these sorts of loopholes. Unfortunately, it's created an even bigger mess.
What intrigues me here is your comment about the school pricing. I took a couple classes a couple years back, and was allowed to buy XP Pro for $15, and Office XP for $5. I got the student version of Visual Studio for free, along with things like Norton AntiVirus and such. That's a compelling deal, and it was the only money I've spent with Microsoft since my Office 95 fiasco, sheesh, about 13 years ago now.
So Microsoft has created this environment, due to activation scheme, where everyone still gets what they want, but NO ONE pays retail. People either get their Microsoft software pre-loaded from the OEM, or play this "game" of finding someone to get them a copy from school or from a company with a broad license agreement. It's a bit of a joke. Microsoft, in a way, gets to have their cake and eat it too. They get to charge exorbitant money for their products in the retail chain, but almost nothing for it through "blessed" sources. It's like they hype their product with sticker shock to make you think you really got something when you find it for $5 or free.
So here I am looking at buying Vista. Really, truly buying a new, shrink-wrapped version of a Microsoft product, and I can see why the fuss. My simple requirement is that I want to play games with more than 4GB of RAM available. As best I can determine, I would want Vista Home Premium 64-bit. It looks like I can buy an OEM version from Newegg for $99. (I just probably need to buy a piece of hardware to fulfill the "OEM" bit. Years ago, retailers would throw in one of those audio cables that went between the CD-ROM and the audio card to squeak past, but I'm willing to bet that wasn't really satisfactory to the letter of Microsoft's law either.) But there are so many versions, I can't exactly tell what I need, and it's too much money to miss.
Sorry for the off-topic post, but it's byzantine. I was really hoping that Microsoft's activation scheme would make people pay retail for their products, and their pricing would them make them compete head-to-head against things like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice. I've really been pulling for the OO project, just to be able to give this to people and ignore the whole problem. Unfortunately, I tried this at my church, and the first person who tried the software couldn't stand it. Admittedly, this was many years ago, but the project doesn't seem to have adjusted it's position relative to MS Office much in the intervening time. So I'm still waiting for the day I can put both Office and OO "on the table," and let the user make a determination. Microsoft has created a culture where the costs of their products are not felt, and OO hasn't been a good alternative (though 3.x is much better).
Drag the print icon from the shared Office menu (what you get from the top-left corner) into the title bar of the application, for easy access. PITA the first time, fine all subsequent times.
Ah yes, the classic it's-intuitive-once-you-learn-it approach to Microsoft's GUI. Unfortunately, because they're the market leader, everyone's had to copy them. It will be interesting to see if free software follows suit this time.
Don't worry. I won't hold your inability to read my mind and figure out why I chose to go that route against you either.;-) It *might* have had something to do with expandability and future overclocking capability.
And I still call BS. The video cards you talk about are running about $350 and $200, respectively. You can't buy a complete PC for $450 (including case, power supply, CPU, mobo, RAM, hard drive(s), CD/DVD(s), etc.) for that kind of money, and put that much into a video card.
If you want to talk about JUST buying a mobo, CPU, RAM, and video card as an UPGRADE, you MIGHT get away with something that plays REASONABLY at moderate settings. Even if you went with a 260 in this scenario, you'd have to give up so much else, you wouldn't have the horsepower to drive it.
So, to the original point, no $450 computer is going to play FO3 at "maximum settings" and peg the frame limit. Period. I mean, come on. What triple-A title is designed to be maxed out on the kind of computer you can pick up at Wal-Mart at the time of release? That doesn't even pass the smell test.
Yeah, no. I call shenanigans. I put a PC together about 5 months ago for about $1700. I have a 780i-based mobo, a 3GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, and 2 GeForce 8800GT's. (I just missed the introduction of the 2xx series, and the lowering of pricing on everything else.) I play FO3 at 1024x768 at "High" settings. Using FRAPS, I can see that I hang around 65-75 FPS walking around and doing things, and it can drop to the 40's when combat gets heavy. (I normally just fight and avoid the VATS thing, unless they're moving very quickly.) So saying you're running at the framelimit on "Ultra" settings on a PC that cost $450? I don't even believe that if you're talking about euros or pounds.
One of my best friends just got a Dell XPS 730. You know, one of those "multiple GPU watercooled machines." It cost $6500. I mean, he had to WORK at getting the price that high. I can't wait to get him setup to play some games on that beast! If I could have afforded it... I wouldn't have. A lot of that cost came from having a 4x 1TB RAID 0+1 disk subsystem. Another huge chunk of the cost was the "Extreme" processor, for which I'll never understand spending that kind of money. I'm thinking that I'd get really close to his performance if I just upgraded to his video cards. But that alone would be about $1000.
The only thing good about SOX is the intent. Just like every other government social program, which is exactly what that mess is. A couple of huge AUDITING COMPANIES failed to do what they were PAID TO DO, and the result was massive new legislation that... wait for it... MANDATED MORE AND STRICTER AUDITING. Now, I'm just a lowly mechanical engineer who does a lot of programming and system administration, but this sounds just like the way the government "punished" Microsoft for being a monopoly -- give millions of dollars of Microsoft software to schools, further entrenching their monopoly!
Up until 8 months ago, I worked for a company that bought the SOX ruse hook, line, and sinker. When it passed, we hired a goofball to head up internal audits. He just pulled a whole bunch of whitepapers off the internet, and made them our policies. Never mind that none of them were consistent, even within themselves, let alone each other. Then we had auditors flowing through the IT department seemingly every other month. Now, if they don't find anything, they're not really doing their jobs, now, are they? So what did the auditors do? They started making stuff up. Stupid crap that did nothing to enhance security or accountability. And we hemorrhaged money for this nonsense.
After YEARS of talking about it, I finally got the ear of a VP of IT, and started the ball rolling to rewrite the most heinous parts of the policies. It wasn't perfect, but it was a lot better.
And then our division got divested to a private equity company. Finally!, I thought. Now we can roll back some more of the ridiculous policies that remained that just made working in IT a pain in the neck. After all, not being public any more meant that we weren't subject to SOX. But, sadly, no. The point of being "private equity" is to spin the company public again, so why get rid of all the bureaucracy when the buyer is just going to want it all back in place anyway.
Even though I'm an engineer, I've taken a basic accounting course. I understand the concept of segregation of duties. But when corporate IT policy demands that I wait a week to get a simple account made because I have to go through a Remedy system, and get 4 people to sign off on it, that's a waste of time. Especially when you consider that they NEVER TOOK THE ABILITY TO CREATE ACCOUNTS AWAY FROM THE ADMINS. Look, if you're going to set up ONE person to dole out accounts because of "segregation of duties," you have to lock the others out. Otherwise, you've just done EXACTLY what you SHOULD NOT DO. You've purposely created a backdoor that could be used to defraud the company, and the executives sit around saying, "We're compliant!" while the auditors just say, "You're following procedure. No problem!"
My mind still boggles.
In your mind, you obviously want to give the people who wrote and passed this steaming turd and the people who implement it the benefit of the doubt. Don't. Because I guarantee that my story has been duplicated in 99% of all public companies since it was signed into law. It's a gargantuan waste of resources. Someone commented that, hey, it provided jobs to us geeks, but it's money the company is NOT using to, you know, PRODUCE SOMETHING OF VALUE, and that ultimately hurts the bottom line.
Eighteen years ago, I discovered emacs. I got hold of a printed copy of the whole manual for it, which was pretty thick, even back then. I took it to a copy shop so I could have one for myself. (Remember, this is back when a 4-foot wide line printer in the terminal room was about all I had access to.)
The girl working the counter flipped open the binder to the very first page, and saw a copyright notification, and promptly told me that she could not copy the manual because it would be illegal to do so. I told her to simply READ what she was looking at. In about thirty seconds, she was copying the manual.
I understand that people want to respect copyright law. I do too. But any sort of ignorance to the fact that it's actually copyright law that MAKES open source work ought to be able to be remedied quickly by just reading the copyright license to the software. Any questions about the situation could then be resolved within about 5 minutes of Googling.
And, just to threadjack my own post, I just-as-quickly forgot about emacs, and allowed myself to be beat about the head and shoulders by vi until now, to the point that I won't go anywhere near emacs.;-)
Well, there was EA's Racing Destruction Set, which let you create your own slot racing tracks, or maybe the 100 levels of Jumpman, which I think were user-generated.
Maybe the real first mods were all the fancy loading screens that the crackers would put on the front of the games they broke...
What you're probably running into, actually, isn't Microsoft's malice or even an admin's laziness. You're probably at the mercy of some boneheaded consultant who came in and told management that it was "SOX-compliant" to leave all of that off. Grrr. Do I have issues with "consultants" and "auditors?" Why, yes. Yes, I do. Thanks for asking.
Somehow none of them have ever managed to subvert the United States. I'm not real worried about the Muslims doing so either. To listen to your post one would think that there is some sort of master plan that all Muslims are aware of to sneak into the West and subvert us from the inside out.
And yet, there's an organization called CAIR whose thinly-veiled purpose is specifically to subvert our American culture in favor of Islam.
You take a fairly genial route in making (I agree, valid) comparisons with cultural exceptions made for Jews, but I don't think they're going to blow my wife and children up if they don't get their way. So, yeah, excuse me while I'm alarmed that Muslim extremists are starting to flex their political muscle in the US.
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You can even remove that dependency if you modify your makespec (search the qtcentre.org forums).
Citation needed.
I've searched high and low for a direct answer on this, and I can't find one. I've read lots and lots of comments that hint that it can be done, but I don't see where I can download a static version of the library to link against, or instructions on how to download the sources and compile my own. If anyone can actually point to a link, I'd be thankful.
Oh, I know where the problem lies. It's in the nVidia disk drivers for my "RAID" controller. Nice, huh? Once they're installed, you basically can't go back. I tried, and reinstalled for the effort. However, I actually lost some data running on the older drivers, so I went back to using the latest version. I keep waiting on a newer version of the nForce drivers to come out. I'd blame it on hardware, but Linux has never had a problem with it. I saw a pie chart the other day that showed that nVidia drivers are responsible for about 30% of all BSOD's.
Just compile statically, and you won't have to bundle anything. OK, you'll probably need to include the mingw10.dll. And libmysql.dll if your app accesses a MySQL database, like mine does.
I've read some things that make me think that you can build the mingw library into your app, but I've also read things that make me run away from that idea screaming.
Also, it's probably possible to build MySQL statically, and then wrap it into the executable as well, but it's not something I want to try.
(Cue people giving the argument, "but Microsoft will just change Windows". Yes, they might, but that doesn't affect the installed base of applications, nor does it affect the myriad third party applications, and if there was a viable target, third party companies would ensure compatability.)
Balogna. They already did this. Back in the days of Office 2000, Codeweavers released Crossover Office, and it was BRILLIANT. RadHat 7.2 with Ximian Desktop and Crossover was the height of Linux desktop usability to me. Something I'm only getting back to in the past couple of years with Gentoo.
(RedHat went to Fedora, and SuSE had it's share of problems. And then, admittedly, I moved to a laptop at work, and even I didn't try to run Linux on it for about 3 years.)
Microsoft saw the writing on the wall. Office XP broke Crossover. Badly. It took them YEARS to figure out how to make it work again, and it still wasn't up to the level of Office 2000. I don't know where it's at now, but I was getting the distinct impression that Microsoft was continuing to play a pretty serious cat-and-mouse game with Wine in general, and Crossover in particular.
I got the free copy they released recently. I should really give it a go again, but I'm now at a place that runs all of their internal systems on Linux, people hardly ever worry about Office documents, and I finally don't have to deal with an Exchange server!
I wouldn't mind if they bundled everything they make, and everything they don't make as well! Just put a price tag on it and let the market sort it out. What I can't stand is that they essentially GIVE the software away through bundling deals with the OEM's, but tell them that they can't install any other software that competes with their products, essentially causing the OEM's to eat the difference, and pass the savings on to their customers. THAT'S anti-capitalistic. Unfortunately, government's only answer is to do what they've done, which includes forcing Microsoft to GIVE MORE of their software away to schools, further entrenching their monopoly. Gah!
Microsoft's making all their money from corporate sales, who are basically beholden because of the Office monopoly. All I want is for Microsoft to sell the same piece of software for the same price to everyone. Let them have 42 editions, for all I care, but just box it and price it and let the market sort it out.
How many individuals do you know have paid full retail price for either Windows or Office? If I could go buy either one for what they cost the OEM, the tier-1 Select customer, or the college student -- or if THEY had to pay what -I- pay, then I would consider that competition. I'd even consider it fair to meet in the middle. If Vista Ultimate cost what a new copy of OS X cost, that would seem to be about right. Have you seen what it actually retails for? Scary.
That's because a typical BSD distro usually has a lot less software installed (out of the box) than a typical Linux distro. They especially have fewer services running. ;-)
Ah... someone else who couldn't understand Linux. Please, sir, there's no need to bitter about it. *nix-based operating systems ARE user friendly, they're just picky about who their friends are.
There are a lot of comments here that are claiming that these comparisons are bad. Bad for who? Maybe bad for YOU, in particular, but I thought some of it was interesting.
Actually, the disk space question is important to me. I have some older WD Raptors in a stripe, and I only have 136 GB of usable space. I tried installing Vista 64-bit over my 12 GB XP partition, and got a low-disk-space warning right after I logged in.
I immediately started doing things like moving the swap file to my data volume, and turning off hibernation and offline-files support, but every time I cleared up some space, Windows would turn around and eat it again. I still have no idea what it was gobbling it up for.
As an aside, it turns out that BOTH the 32-bit AND 64-bit versions of Vista were incredibly crashy for me. I only keep Windows around to play games, and Fallout 3 crashed 3 times within 5 minutes on 64-bit, and 5 times within an hour on 32-bit. I'm back on XP where I get a couple BSOD's every month, but it's only when I go to shutdown. I can play as long as I'd like.
I'm all for Windows and Office and all the rest...
Having used Windows for years, it does not have NEAR the functionality of any given Linux distro without heavy tweaking.
I mean, come on, I have to install office programs, compilers, editors, (non-DRM) media players, (real) CD/DVD burning programs, terminals, secure communication programs, (real) file transfer programs, etc., and that's just the top categories. Let alone all the crap you have to install, just because you're using Windows, like anti-virus and anti-malware programs.
And then there's the lovely day that a program simply... stops working. Why? Who knows! Time to format and reinstall!
Seriously. I have a Windows partition because I like PC video gaming. (Lord, help me, sometimes even I don't know why. I keep all my drivers up to date, but I still get BSOD's a couple times a month.) But I can't stand to try to use it for real work.
PLEASE mod parent DOWN. How this guy managed to bypass the usual notation of posting domains behind links, I don't know, but, thankfully, he's not clever enough to bypass the preview of the link in the status bar of FireFox...
Except the way all the Linux updaters seem to work, is that they'll never update major versions in any supported way. So if your distro came with OpenOffice 3.0, it might update you all the way to 3.0.42, but it'll be a cold day in hell before you get 3.1. You need to upgrade to the next version of the distro for that.
-- (ed.: emphasis added)
*cough* Gentoo *cough*
I had -one- situation like this when I was a teen driver. Very late in a little town, and the cop just told me to go home. At 16 and on the honor roll, being thrown in jail could have really put a dent in my life. I'm very thankful for how that turned out.
However, now that I'm just about 40, the more I hear about stories like this, the more upset I get about the situation in general. The police simply should NOT have this sort of discretion. I think that, if people were held strictly accountable to the law, we might stand a better chance at getting some of the more stupid, invasive, and egregious laws fixed.
Take your tail light example, for instance. Should there really be laws that make driving with a tail light out a crime? Maybe, maybe not. What it is used for is to pull people over to provide an opportunity to bust them for a more serious crime. (Now that I think about it, I currently have a tail light out.) If EVERYone who has a light out got pulled over and given a ticket tomorrow, the outcry might get that law repealed. I don't think it's a policeman's job to adjudicate who gets punished and who doesn't.
Add to this the fact that, as I've lived, I've known various people in law enforcement. Now, none of us are perfect; I understand that. But, when I was younger, I just expected that folks in law enforcement would live on a little higher plane of morality than the rest of us. The fact is, they're just people too. And, given that, it makes giving them this incredible, far-reaching authority even more difficult to swallow.
Look! Down under the bridge! It's a witty troll! No... It's an insightful troll! No... Oh, it's just a boring, obvious troll.
This is a really good point. The cost got passed on to me (or, rather, my employer) through their fees and tuition.
When the local university around here first signed up, I read the license from top to bottom in order to know how this was going to affect people. At least at the time, it said that -- once you matriculated -- the software was yours, and you could do anything with it that you wanted to (except resell it, of course). I wonder if that license has been changed. I didn't read it when I bought my copies. Any more, I don't care. With Microsoft putting all the activation stuff in there, I figure, if they want to really enforce their copyright, they can add on parts that would make it "die" in 4 years, or whatever. It's their problem, not mine. I WANT them to do this, but they never will, because it would drive another section of the buying public to, say, Ubuntu. (Gentoo FTW!)
And as for the poster who thought my copy of Office 2K wasn't legit, sorry but my boss picked them up along with some desktops when a local business folded. We ended up with a truckload of desktops, some office furniture, and all the nice Premium software packed up into boxes from the auction.
Another good example. Last time I checked (and that was quite awhile ago, I admit), Microsoft didn't allow you to resell the license. In fact, and this is from having dealt with the licensing for the CAD/CAM/FEA department for many years, I can't think of anyone who does. In our IT department, we would roll out deprecated machines to a local charity who would refurbish them for needy school kids. Since we were getting (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) our licenses on the new computers, the license of the existing (and age-appropriate) MS OS would still be valid, right? Nope. Not even for that sort of charitable work. So, unless that policy got reversed, again, that would be a -- technically -- illegal way to get Microsoft software. Again, this is a way that Microsoft gets to own the proprietary software world, yet never has to face the music on their own anti-competitive retail pricing.
While I'm at it, the big rumor at the time I was learning about all of that was that you could use the same license on a laptop if you had a desktop machine for the majority of your use. That, and using the secondary license like that, only on a home computer. Nope! The MS rep squashed that in a big hurry.
And while folks here like to point out the high cost of MS Office I simply doubt that most users are paying retail. I picked up my MS Office 2K Pro for around $50 years ago and I got MS Office 2K3 for free from school.
I don't think you're copy of O2K Pro was legitimate. I had this discussion with a Microsoft employee just before my Fortune 250 company bought a Select license agreement. She was adamant that there was NO WAY that I bought a legit copy of Office 95 for less than the retail price of (something like) $500. My copy was probably stolen, or maybe it was just a really good pirated version. I think Microsoft's newer registration and activation system has done a good job of closing these sorts of loopholes. Unfortunately, it's created an even bigger mess.
What intrigues me here is your comment about the school pricing. I took a couple classes a couple years back, and was allowed to buy XP Pro for $15, and Office XP for $5. I got the student version of Visual Studio for free, along with things like Norton AntiVirus and such. That's a compelling deal, and it was the only money I've spent with Microsoft since my Office 95 fiasco, sheesh, about 13 years ago now.
So Microsoft has created this environment, due to activation scheme, where everyone still gets what they want, but NO ONE pays retail. People either get their Microsoft software pre-loaded from the OEM, or play this "game" of finding someone to get them a copy from school or from a company with a broad license agreement. It's a bit of a joke. Microsoft, in a way, gets to have their cake and eat it too. They get to charge exorbitant money for their products in the retail chain, but almost nothing for it through "blessed" sources. It's like they hype their product with sticker shock to make you think you really got something when you find it for $5 or free.
So here I am looking at buying Vista. Really, truly buying a new, shrink-wrapped version of a Microsoft product, and I can see why the fuss. My simple requirement is that I want to play games with more than 4GB of RAM available. As best I can determine, I would want Vista Home Premium 64-bit. It looks like I can buy an OEM version from Newegg for $99. (I just probably need to buy a piece of hardware to fulfill the "OEM" bit. Years ago, retailers would throw in one of those audio cables that went between the CD-ROM and the audio card to squeak past, but I'm willing to bet that wasn't really satisfactory to the letter of Microsoft's law either.) But there are so many versions, I can't exactly tell what I need, and it's too much money to miss.
Sorry for the off-topic post, but it's byzantine. I was really hoping that Microsoft's activation scheme would make people pay retail for their products, and their pricing would them make them compete head-to-head against things like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice. I've really been pulling for the OO project, just to be able to give this to people and ignore the whole problem. Unfortunately, I tried this at my church, and the first person who tried the software couldn't stand it. Admittedly, this was many years ago, but the project doesn't seem to have adjusted it's position relative to MS Office much in the intervening time. So I'm still waiting for the day I can put both Office and OO "on the table," and let the user make a determination. Microsoft has created a culture where the costs of their products are not felt, and OO hasn't been a good alternative (though 3.x is much better).
Drag the print icon from the shared Office menu (what you get from the top-left corner) into the title bar of the application, for easy access. PITA the first time, fine all subsequent times.
Ah yes, the classic it's-intuitive-once-you-learn-it approach to Microsoft's GUI. Unfortunately, because they're the market leader, everyone's had to copy them. It will be interesting to see if free software follows suit this time.
OK, my bad. I should have checked Newegg first. Call it $150 and $250. You might swing a decent UPGRADE for $450.
Don't worry. I won't hold your inability to read my mind and figure out why I chose to go that route against you either. ;-) It *might* have had something to do with expandability and future overclocking capability.
And I still call BS. The video cards you talk about are running about $350 and $200, respectively. You can't buy a complete PC for $450 (including case, power supply, CPU, mobo, RAM, hard drive(s), CD/DVD(s), etc.) for that kind of money, and put that much into a video card.
If you want to talk about JUST buying a mobo, CPU, RAM, and video card as an UPGRADE, you MIGHT get away with something that plays REASONABLY at moderate settings. Even if you went with a 260 in this scenario, you'd have to give up so much else, you wouldn't have the horsepower to drive it.
So, to the original point, no $450 computer is going to play FO3 at "maximum settings" and peg the frame limit. Period. I mean, come on. What triple-A title is designed to be maxed out on the kind of computer you can pick up at Wal-Mart at the time of release? That doesn't even pass the smell test.
Yeah, no. I call shenanigans. I put a PC together about 5 months ago for about $1700. I have a 780i-based mobo, a 3GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, and 2 GeForce 8800GT's. (I just missed the introduction of the 2xx series, and the lowering of pricing on everything else.) I play FO3 at 1024x768 at "High" settings. Using FRAPS, I can see that I hang around 65-75 FPS walking around and doing things, and it can drop to the 40's when combat gets heavy. (I normally just fight and avoid the VATS thing, unless they're moving very quickly.) So saying you're running at the framelimit on "Ultra" settings on a PC that cost $450? I don't even believe that if you're talking about euros or pounds.
One of my best friends just got a Dell XPS 730. You know, one of those "multiple GPU watercooled machines." It cost $6500. I mean, he had to WORK at getting the price that high. I can't wait to get him setup to play some games on that beast! If I could have afforded it... I wouldn't have. A lot of that cost came from having a 4x 1TB RAID 0+1 disk subsystem. Another huge chunk of the cost was the "Extreme" processor, for which I'll never understand spending that kind of money. I'm thinking that I'd get really close to his performance if I just upgraded to his video cards. But that alone would be about $1000.
The only thing good about SOX is the intent. Just like every other government social program, which is exactly what that mess is. A couple of huge AUDITING COMPANIES failed to do what they were PAID TO DO, and the result was massive new legislation that... wait for it... MANDATED MORE AND STRICTER AUDITING. Now, I'm just a lowly mechanical engineer who does a lot of programming and system administration, but this sounds just like the way the government "punished" Microsoft for being a monopoly -- give millions of dollars of Microsoft software to schools, further entrenching their monopoly!
Up until 8 months ago, I worked for a company that bought the SOX ruse hook, line, and sinker. When it passed, we hired a goofball to head up internal audits. He just pulled a whole bunch of whitepapers off the internet, and made them our policies. Never mind that none of them were consistent, even within themselves, let alone each other. Then we had auditors flowing through the IT department seemingly every other month. Now, if they don't find anything, they're not really doing their jobs, now, are they? So what did the auditors do? They started making stuff up. Stupid crap that did nothing to enhance security or accountability. And we hemorrhaged money for this nonsense.
After YEARS of talking about it, I finally got the ear of a VP of IT, and started the ball rolling to rewrite the most heinous parts of the policies. It wasn't perfect, but it was a lot better.
And then our division got divested to a private equity company. Finally!, I thought. Now we can roll back some more of the ridiculous policies that remained that just made working in IT a pain in the neck. After all, not being public any more meant that we weren't subject to SOX. But, sadly, no. The point of being "private equity" is to spin the company public again, so why get rid of all the bureaucracy when the buyer is just going to want it all back in place anyway.
Even though I'm an engineer, I've taken a basic accounting course. I understand the concept of segregation of duties. But when corporate IT policy demands that I wait a week to get a simple account made because I have to go through a Remedy system, and get 4 people to sign off on it, that's a waste of time. Especially when you consider that they NEVER TOOK THE ABILITY TO CREATE ACCOUNTS AWAY FROM THE ADMINS. Look, if you're going to set up ONE person to dole out accounts because of "segregation of duties," you have to lock the others out. Otherwise, you've just done EXACTLY what you SHOULD NOT DO. You've purposely created a backdoor that could be used to defraud the company, and the executives sit around saying, "We're compliant!" while the auditors just say, "You're following procedure. No problem!"
My mind still boggles.
In your mind, you obviously want to give the people who wrote and passed this steaming turd and the people who implement it the benefit of the doubt. Don't. Because I guarantee that my story has been duplicated in 99% of all public companies since it was signed into law. It's a gargantuan waste of resources. Someone commented that, hey, it provided jobs to us geeks, but it's money the company is NOT using to, you know, PRODUCE SOMETHING OF VALUE, and that ultimately hurts the bottom line.
Eighteen years ago, I discovered emacs. I got hold of a printed copy of the whole manual for it, which was pretty thick, even back then. I took it to a copy shop so I could have one for myself. (Remember, this is back when a 4-foot wide line printer in the terminal room was about all I had access to.)
The girl working the counter flipped open the binder to the very first page, and saw a copyright notification, and promptly told me that she could not copy the manual because it would be illegal to do so. I told her to simply READ what she was looking at. In about thirty seconds, she was copying the manual.
I understand that people want to respect copyright law. I do too. But any sort of ignorance to the fact that it's actually copyright law that MAKES open source work ought to be able to be remedied quickly by just reading the copyright license to the software. Any questions about the situation could then be resolved within about 5 minutes of Googling.
And, just to threadjack my own post, I just-as-quickly forgot about emacs, and allowed myself to be beat about the head and shoulders by vi until now, to the point that I won't go anywhere near emacs. ;-)
Well, there was EA's Racing Destruction Set, which let you create your own slot racing tracks, or maybe the 100 levels of Jumpman, which I think were user-generated.
Maybe the real first mods were all the fancy loading screens that the crackers would put on the front of the games they broke...
What you're probably running into, actually, isn't Microsoft's malice or even an admin's laziness. You're probably at the mercy of some boneheaded consultant who came in and told management that it was "SOX-compliant" to leave all of that off. Grrr. Do I have issues with "consultants" and "auditors?" Why, yes. Yes, I do. Thanks for asking.
Somehow none of them have ever managed to subvert the United States. I'm not real worried about the Muslims doing so either. To listen to your post one would think that there is some sort of master plan that all Muslims are aware of to sneak into the West and subvert us from the inside out.
And yet, there's an organization called CAIR whose thinly-veiled purpose is specifically to subvert our American culture in favor of Islam.
You take a fairly genial route in making (I agree, valid) comparisons with cultural exceptions made for Jews, but I don't think they're going to blow my wife and children up if they don't get their way. So, yeah, excuse me while I'm alarmed that Muslim extremists are starting to flex their political muscle in the US.